Aqaba

Dana Biosphere Reserve

Follow Team Outpost in Jordan this November—let us be your eyes and ears to all the cultural icons and iconic adventures the country has on offer: from mighty Petra to mountain biking, trekking to camel-riding, diving to desert camping, join Team Outpost as we uncover Jordan’s hidden adventures.

After taking the bottle, he asked Abu’l Shalaan what the date was. “It’s the 28th,” my guide responded. The shepherd nodded sagaciously, mumbling something inaudible to him­self. Then, as if suddenly remembering why he had asked, he added: “Yes, but what month is it?”

The famed First World War British officer, who led a Bedouin guerilla war against the Ottoman Turks in what is now Jordan and Syria, used al-Azraq, and particularly its ancient fortress Qasr al-Azraq, as his base in the winter of 1917-18.

Abu’l Shalaan got out of the vehicle and parked himself quietly on the edge of the pond. He took a front row seat before an unlikely group of birds and insects, and sat amid a spectacular silence. I followed suit, embracing the moment where less was certainly so much more.

How anyone could know precisely where to drive off a flat desert highway without the benefit of landmarks, or a GPS, to find a little known fort that is poorly depicted on maps and hidden in a wilderness of rock, was the question I kept turning in my head, as Ahmed al-Shalaan steered our vehicle tentatively off the asphalt. “I came this way once before, many years ago,” he said, smiling as though he had divined my thoughts.

The reputation of the Bedouin as “masters of the desert” was solidified by explorers like Sir Richard Francis Burton, Colonel T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and Wilfred Thesiger, who travelled among them and experienced the most desperate rigours of desert travel. Those stories had fuelled my dreams.

Having long ago succumbed to an obsession with deserts, my goal for the trip is to pick up enough camel skills to do a desert crossing entirely on my own. So in an effort to connect with this special region of the earth, photographer Jason George and I set out with Raad Abou M’aitik, a 22-year-old Bedouin of the Howeitat tribe.